Fighting oppression
One more post from my reading of Free at Last?.
I found the focus throughout the book on both individual and corporate level expressions of justice to be crucial. In the context of corporate level fight against oppression, Ellis gave two different groups of assertions in chapter 9, including these two: “The Bible is our basis for freedom and dignity” (p.131) and “We need a radical change if we want justice” (p. 132). In light of those acknowledgments, though, I would question #4 from page 132: “If our community functions as a nation, we can move toward freedom and dignity.”
It is crucial to acknowledge that institutional and corporate measures – not only individual steps – must be taken to bring justice and fight oppression. But I think Ellis glosses over one distinction that really matters regarding our role. On both the individual and the corporate levels, we must fight against our own tendencies to oppress others; we cannot, at least not in the same ways, fight against others‘ tendencies to oppress.
From Isaiah 2, among other places, I think we see a universal characteristic of human sin nature in tendencies toward oppression. So all groups, the rich, the poor, the established majorities and the struggling minorities, all groups have a sinful tendency toward oppressive/exploitative violation of other groups – just as all individual people have sinful tendencies to promote self at the expense of others. How that oppressive/exploitative character expresses itself will certainly vary, given the variable levels of power and opportunity the individual or group has. So, certainly we can speak meaningfully of oppressors and the oppressed, and make distinctions between them.
Still, what’s crucial is not a clear delineation between the good guys and the bad guys, but between the good and the bad, between freedom and oppression, between justice and injustice. What’s needed is a commitment to freedom and justice and a hatred for oppression and injustice, and a love for mercy and righteousness. Too often we get distracted with a hatred for those we perceive to be the oppressors. Too often we neglect the oppressive tendencies in our own hearts.
The call must be – and Ellis does give it – to fight oppression in ourselves and in our groups and to resist oppression everywhere we encounter it. We cannot fight other people’s battles against their own oppressive tendencies for them (hence my question about p. 132 above). We must resist their oppression as faithfully as we can and humbly leave room for them to fight their inner sin, just as we should prioritize our own inner fight against our own sin.
We must maintain the mentality that even the oppressed do not hold the moral high ground. We must see ourselves as both oppressed and as sinful oppressors. And we must commit to relate to others – including through our resistance - through an economy of grace, because grace is what we all require to be made whole.
We should seek justice, righteousness, freedom and dignity for all people – and seek those qualities not only as ends for some particular groups, but to build our strategies on those qualities as means, trusting that the benefit carried by any engagement in social reform will be directly determined by that engagement’s adherence to those same principles. We must pursue good things in good ways; we must not get lured into pursuing good things in inherently unfaithful, or principally inconsistent ways . To do so would be to elevate one particular goal of those secondary goods over other seemingly conflicting concerns. The only corrective is to pursue those things for the sake of – and in reliance on – a higher good: the glory of God.
We must understand justice for people to be an inherently good thing, as an unavoidable derivative to reverence for God. If we try to start with only abstract qualities like justice without a foundation in the holiness of God, we will not be able to avoid obsessing over particular applications/pursuits of those good things at the expense of other equally valid applications/pursuits. But if a concern for the glory of God under-girds those endeavors, then when one application of justice must be deferred (temporarily) in the pursuit of another application, then we can content ourselves with faithful means as well as faithful ends, and patiently endure the time until all things are harmonized under Christ’s Lordship (cf. Philippians 2:11, etc.).
